


Outro

by stephanericher



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 07:56:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18634009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: The band was never meant to be anything serious.





	Outro

**Author's Note:**

> this fic only exists bc i wanted to write about music so uh don't expect anything more than that

Blisters are erupting on Kasamatsu’s fingers and the sweat drips down his back like rain on a window when the sky’s starting to clear up. He doesn’t have much of a tendency to romanticize things, but after a week’s vacation with his family playing a session with the band is a different kind of homecoming. He feels jet-lagged from the same time zone, a little too slow after having missed very little time. His fingers remember the chords and his throat remembers the backing vocals, the timing. His ear remembers the cues, the other instruments and vocals, the simplicity of Kobori’s bass line letting his own rhythm stray a little and come back. 

The band was never meant to be anything serious. Kasamatsu’s interest in guitar was waning by high school, but he didn’t really have any other hobbies, so getting his friends to buy second-hand instruments and jam with him in an empty classroom had seemed like a last-ditch effort to make his hobby feel less like a sunk cost and an excuse to hang out with Kobori and Moriyama. But it had worked on both counts.

They’d become an official school club the next year, gotten a singer-slash-keyboardist in Nakamura and another guitarist in Hayakawa, and the year after that Kise had badgered them long and hard to join on lead vocals, and they’d never really stopped. It’s difficult now, being adults with full-time jobs and having to pay for studio time and arrange gigs at bars with an audience a tenth the size of a high school class and make do when someone is missing, but it’s still mostly worth it.

Sometimes, Kasamatsu worries about when it won’t be. He can’t help it; he’s a worrier (a mother hen, according to Moriyama; prepared, according to Kobori, and neither of those is exactly true). But it always is, eventually; all the bands they played with in high school have dissolved, some people sticking around the local music circuit and others leaving entirely for different hobbies, or for work and family responsibilities.

Between the six of them in the band, they’ve written maybe an album’s worth of songs. They do covers, too, whatever’s hot on the radio that they can adapt to fit their sound, or (more commonly) the stuff they listened to in high school, bands that were together for less time than it’s been since Kasamatsu met Moriyama and Kobori, and those are ingrained in their hands and voices as if pressed onto records. 

They don’t have time to do more than a handful of those songs in the studio in each session, not that much less time than they’d had on those afternoons back in high school, but it feels compressed like a low-quality audio file. Like if they got another gig (and it’s been a while, really; Kasamatsu has to take more than a few seconds to place it in his mental calendar) they would be underprepared, even if everyone made every session and they used each minute wisely.

Maybe it’s fitting that they end on their most dirgelike song, plodding guitars and haunting keyboards, a song Moriyama had written for a passing crush whose name and face Kasamatsu’s forgotten by now.

“Nakamura was telling me about this haunted house concert,” Kobori says, as they pack up their instruments. “It’s in a month or so, right?”

Nakamura digs the creased flyer out of his pocket and unfolds it. “Yeah. They’ll negotiate a payment and we’d get an hour to play. Obviously, it depends on who else applies and how many spots there are—”

“Will we get, like, blood and slime dropped on us?” Kise says, wrinkling his nose.

“It’s not that kind of haunted house,” says Nakamura. “There are real spirits--it’s an old house where they say a woman murdered her grandchildren—”

“I don’t think we need to know that much,” says Kasamatsu. “But if you’re all free on the date, let’s do it?”

It pops out of his mouth, but it’s like an accidental harmony. They’re not ready now, but they could be in a month. It could be the thing they need to revitalize this, to feel more like home after a vacation than home after a semester at college.

* * *

When Moriyama’s got something he wants to talk about, he fidgets and starts to talk about other things, hangs around the person he’s trying to talk to and doesn’t get anywhere near his point. Kobori’s patient enough to coax that stuff out of him, but Kasamatsu most definitely is not, especially when he’s shopping for a new guitar slide and all the ones in the music shop appear to be for fingers much bigger than his. 

He’d ask Kobori for help, but Kobori’s wandered off, probably into the book section again, and Moriyama’s practically hanging off Kasamatsu’s shoulder. 

“What?” says Kasamatsu. 

“Kasamatsu…”

Kasamatsu waits, tempering the urge to snatch away his shoulder or tell Moriyama to quit whining. 

“Do you really think we should do this gig?”

“You didn’t say no before,” says Kasamatsu.

“Are we going to be ready?” says Moriyama. “And I don’t mean in terms of equipment.”

Kasamatsu frowns. Leave it to Moriyama to start a serious question here, but--hadn’t it been on the tip of his own tongue? He can’t be too much of a hypocrite.

“If not now, when? When was the last time we had a real gig?”

“That’s what I mean,” says Moriyama. “When you weren’t there last week, we canceled the session...the studio double-booked us and offered another slot and we just took the money back.”

“And you didn’t tell me that?”

“We didn’t think about it,” says Moriyama.

“I mean…” Kasamatsu starts, his words almost catching in his throat.

Thinking about this band consciously changing, becoming more casual or even breaking up, is a hypothetical that’s taken up residence in his mind and unpacked his baggage. But it’s always felt like something he’d carried alone, and when he thinks about it too much it’s difficult, to say the least. The band has been part of his life for so long, like a child he’d nurtured. He’s given so much of his time, so much of his money--so many broken guitar strings, so many pedals and accessories, hours in the studio--that for it to suddenly drop feels wrong. The band deserves better.

“What are you suggesting?” says Kasamatsu.

“I don’t know,” says Moriyama. “I don’t want to give it up; it’s not like I have something to replace it with, but...you know?”

Yeah, Kasamatsu does. And that makes it more difficult still. 

“Go get Kobori so he can reach the top row,” says Kasamatsu.

Moriyama doesn’t complain about being ordered around this time. He probably needs a moment to himself too.


End file.
